Raffael Schneider

Platform engineer and security-focused technologist based in Switzerland. Raffael works across platform automation, edge infrastructure, applied security, and open standards. He speaks at conferences (RSAC 2026) and consults on infrastructure and systems engineering.

The idea behind Archipelag.io started in 2016, when Raffael visited an Ethereum mining operation in Glarus, a mountain town in eastern Switzerland. Watching Vitalik Buterin inspect rows of GPU-laden mining rigs, he became fascinated — not by the financial side of crypto, but by the infrastructure topology itself: thousands of people, globally, had independently decided to run compute infrastructure from their homes.

That observation turned into a decade-long project. After years of sketching architectures and prototyping, the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 reoriented the vision toward GPU-accelerated inference as the critical workload. The technology stack reflects a pragmatic philosophy: Elixir and BEAM for fault-tolerant coordination, Rust for the host agent, NATS for simple and reliable messaging, and Docker for workload isolation — each chosen for what it does well, not for hype.

The conviction is straightforward: the hardware exists, the bandwidth exists, the people exist. What's missing is coordination — a protocol and registry connecting idle consumer GPU capacity with users who need affordable, low-latency compute. Archipelag.io is that missing piece.